DHARAVI, THE SURVIVOR

Dharavi has proven the doomsday predictions wrong and is now being hailed as a global model to combat COVID-19. How did one of the world’s biggest slums curtail the spread of the pandemic, when at least 10 people live in a cramped 1-2-metre shack? How did it manage to keep the number of cases and deaths low despite pathetic hygiene conditions and without proper medical facilities?

- BANJOT KAUR

ISOLATION. IT’S an unfamiliar word for those living in Dharavi, one of the densest and poorest habitations on the planet. More than 0.86 million people live here—every sq km houses 0.2 million people, making it 600 times more densely populous than the country average. Spread over 2.2 sq km in the heart of Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, this settlement is dotted with 300 cm x 300 cm shacks, dubbed kholis, each shared by five to seven people. At places, the contiguity of their blue tarp roofs gets broken with double storey tin-roofed houses and some 450 community toilets which cater to the needs of 80 per cent of the population.

So, on April 1 when Dharavi reported its first case of COVID-19, it sent jitters among the authorities, already struggling to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Mumbai. With hospitals running out of beds, and death toll touching new highs, the city had become one of the hotbeds of infection in the country.

It was feared that Dharavi’s cramped set-up would soon lead to community transmission, making matters worse and throwing a medical challenge seen never before. After all, maintaining the physical distance of at least 6 ft (2 metres), which is the first line of defence to prevent the spread of COVID-19, is nearly absent in Dharavi even if one gets confined in a shack. Wearing masks in suffocating settings and regular washing of hands and maintaining hygiene are the other impediments. But Dharavi has survived the brush with the pandemic.